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10/06/2011 @ 5:32PM10,667 views

Carine Roitfeld: Irreverent, Thank Goodness

Carine Roitfeld has had quite a time since she left Vogue Paris last January.

Besides planning her own magazine due out next September, the 56-year-old Parisienne has done an ad campaign and book for Chanel, commanded an extensive display in the windows of Barneys New York, and guest-edited the October issue of V magazine.

Her most recent endeavor is irreverent (Rizzoli, $100), edited by Vogue Hommes creative director Alex Wiederin and Purple‘s Olivier Zahm, the art world impresario both embraced and reviled for his magazine’s “porno-chic” content. (Roitfeld, for her part, calls him a poet.)

Irreverent serves as a visual history of a career among the highest echelons of fashion-world elite. More than 360 pages of tear sheets and photographs chronicle Roitfeld’s work since the early 1990s with Tom Ford at Gucci, at Elle and The Face, and with close friend Mario Testino at Vogue.

Certainly the book is self-serving–but that’s what makes it fun. What comes across most strongly is something everyone already knows: the lady is a bit of a raconteur, and always has been. It’s why we like her.

“Carine Roitfeld’s influence on fashion is first and foremost her own doing–the fruit of that edgy, chic, and audacious glamour that is hers and hers alone,” Cathy Horyn writes in the forward. “Her style is as sharp and assertive as it is hard to describe, for it depends as much on how she wears the clothes as the brand and labels she chooses.”

A few of Roitfeld’s most memorable scandal-inducers: Model Lara Stone painted black in an October 2009 spread; a plus-sized Crystal Renn lying squarely naked–and untrimmed–in a red trench; grown women modeling clothes made for little girls; little girls sexed up in stilettos. Lots of fur, lots of the time. Obviously.

It’s admirable that the controversies haven’t made her gun-shy.

“Some of my pictures have shocked people, but being provocative per se doesn’t particularly bother me provided the photos don’t have a harmful effect on younger, more fragile readers,” Roitfeld says in the book. “Just because someone is holding a gun doesn’t make an image controversial. It all depends on where you put the gun, who is holding it.”

The only thing she’ll self-censor? Smoking–at least most of the time.

“You can’t deny that a woman looks great when she’s smoking–so free and elegant,” Roitfeld says. “But it’s not allowed any more. I’ve convinced myself, though, that it’s just too easy to do a successful photo with a cigarette.”

The photos are interspersed with shots from her youth (father a Russian film producer; mother the iconic Parisian housewife) and of her family–longtime partner Christian Restoin and children Vladimir, 28, and Julia, 30. The text comprises questions from industry friends like Soffia Coppla, Rick Owens, Anna Wintour, Hedi Slimane, Natalia Vodianova and Christopher Kane. Horyn wrote the front essay; Zahm provided a bulk of questions (What influence did your mother have? Are you sensitive to criticism?) as well.

Apparent is the fact that in the grand scheme of things–and not to diminish her revolutionary work there–Roitfeld’s time at Vogue Paris was relatively short. Sure, a decade is a long time, but irreverent makes very clear that it was but one stop on her radar. She had always said she wouldn’t stay forever. The detachment is refreshing.

Other parentheticals:

- She claims she’s shy. “Monsier Saint Laurent was pathologically shy, and he made the Saint Laurent woman in his own image. Like her, I am shy. And to protect myself, I adopted something of an androgynous look, just as his women did.”

- She hates when you compliment her on what she’s wearing. “I think that Saint Laurent’s ideal woman is a combination of shyness, femininity, and an androgynous in a nightclub. I don’t know if I’m an Yves Saint Laurent woman or not, but I hate when people compliment me on what I’m wearing. It was Saint Laurent who said that you should compliment a woman for her beauty and not for her clothes, which are only supposed to set off her beauty.”

- She doesn’t collect clothes. “I don’t have the space, so I don’t keep my old clothes, aside from a few vintage items. I give a lot to my daughter. She looks divine wearing my floral hippie dresses, I’m ecstatic!”

- Being a mother has influenced her style “not in the least.” But it is her “greatest joy.”

- She doesn’t think she’s an artist. “In a way, I envy the freedom artists have. Artists can push themselves beyond their limits, in pursuit of their ideas and their vision, even if they are inhabited by demons that can also play tricks on them.”

- Her private life is not what you think. “People think that I’m a seductress and a nymphomaniac. But I abide by the principle of absolute fidelity! My personal sexual proclivities are monogamous and strictly heterosexual, even if I do have a certain taste for risk.

“My job allows me to give expression to erotic fantasies and depict them in pictures, to experience them through image-making but not in reality. My private life is a lot more ladylike and less sultry than the fashion photos I imagine.”

In short: The woman is edgy, but she’s not angry about it.

Rather than coming off as cloying, annoying or cliché, it comes off as cool. And that has made all the difference.

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